THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2015
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The Barakats and the Abu-Salhas
found the "parking dispute" interpreta-
tion trivializing and implausible. In an
interview with CNN, Mohammad Abu-
Salha, Yusor's father, said, "I am sure my
daughter felt hated, and she said, liter-
ally, 'Daddy, I think it is because of the
way we look and the way we dress.' " At
the funeral, which was held on a field in
Raleigh, to accommodate the more than
five thousand people---many of them
non-Muslims---who showed up, Mo-
hammad told the crowd, "We have no
doubt why they died." He went on, "We
are not seeking any revenge. Our chil-
dren are much more valuable than any
revenge. When we say that this was a
hate crime, it's all about protecting all
other children in the U.S.A.---it is all
about making this country that they loved
and where they lived and died peaceful
for everybody else. We need to identify
things as they really are." The victims
had been killed "execution style." He
spoke of them as martyrs.
A month after the funeral, I met
Barakat's sister, Suzanne, at an annual
fund-raiser for the Al-Iman school. She
told me, "It's time people started talking
about how real Islamophobia is---that it's
not just a word tossed around for polit-
ical purposes but that it has literally
knocked on our doorstep and killed three
of our American children." Suzanne was
soft-spoken and deliberate in her public
appearances after the killings, though she
sometimes broke down. She could barely
take in the fact that her brother, his wife,
and his sister-in-law had been murdered,
and she certainly could not accept that
it had been over a parking space.
For Suzanne and many others, the
killings fit into a larger story of increas-
ing hostility toward Muslims. Accord-
ing to statistics compiled by the F.B.I.,
anti-Muslim hate crimes multiplied after
September 11th, and they have remained
five times as common as they were be-
fore 2001. Most religiously motivated
hate crimes are against Jews: in 2013,
sixty per cent of such crimes were of this
type, whereas fourteen per cent were
anti-Muslim. But many American Mus-
lims feel that the media's daily coverage
of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State---and
the tendency, in popular culture and pun-
ditry, to equate Islam with terrorism---
is making them more vulnerable.
In 2014, a Pew Research Center sur-
vey found that Americans harbor chill-
ier feelings toward Muslims than toward
any other religious group. Some politi-
cians play to such sentiments---summon-
ing, say, the improbable spectre of Sha-
ria law in the U.S. In 2014, David Agema,
a member of the Republican National
Committee in Michigan, posted on his
Facebook page, "Have you ever seen a
Muslim do anything that contributes
positively to the American way of life?"
Anna Bigelow, a professor of Islamic
studies at N.C. State, who taught Barakat,
told me, "Whether Hicks was motivated
in a particular way might not be the issue.
Just as maybe it's not the issue whether
any of the cops in Ferguson or on Staten
Island actually were personally motivated
by racial animus in the moment. Afri-
can-Americans know that this is part of
a bigger picture and a systemic feeling
of insecurity vis à vis the cops. And Mus-
lim Americans have that feeling vis à vis
a certain sector of the society that is be-
coming more vocal and increasingly com-
fortable expressing not just its dislike for
Islam but its profound distrust."
In the days after the murders, tens of
thousands of people began tweeting
about them using the hashtag #Muslim-
LivesMatter. Bloggers complained that
the Chapel Hill killings weren't getting
enough media coverage, and that if the
roles had been reversed---Muslim shooter,
non-Muslim victims---the incident
would have been labelled terrorism. In
fact, by Thursday, two days after the mur-
ders, the story was receiving a lot of at-
tention: the Times ran a front-page story;
Anderson Cooper interviewed Suzanne
Barakat; Mohammad Abu-Salha ap-
peared on CNN and MSNBC. Never-
theless, many of the critics felt that the
coverage had come only as the result of
pressure from social media. That day,
Recep Erdoğan,Turkey's President, called
on President Barack Obama to make a
statement about the Chapel Hill mur-
ders. Palestinian o cials cited the mur-
ders as evidence of the "growth of rac-
ism and religious extremism" in America.
On Friday, Obama did address the shoot-
ings, saying, "No one in the United States
of America should ever be targeted be-
cause of who they are, what they look
like, or how they worship."
By then, the F.B.I. and the Depart-
ment of Justice had announced that they
were opening an inquiry into whether
the murders constituted a hate crime.
One reason that federal hate-crime stat-
utes exist is to insure that local prosecu-
tors respond strongly to such acts. Van-
dalism typically carries a relatively light
sentence; spray-painting a swastika on a
synagogue will carry a heavier one. The
crime in Chapel Hill was a first-degree
multiple murder, which carries a sen-
tence of either life in prison or the death
penalty. The Durham County prosecu-
tor has announced that it is pursuing the
death penalty, so the federal inquiry, when
it is completed, will not increase the po-
tential severity of Hicks's sentence. But
hate-crime statutes are symbolic as well
as instrumental: they exist not only to
maximize punishment but also to un-
derscore disapproval of bias, allowing us
to name an ugly motivation and renounce
it. To the families and friends of the vic-
tims, it was the naming of the crime, not
the punishment, that mattered most.
The day after the killings, Robert
Maitland, an attorney in Chapel Hill,
was visited by a woman seeking legal as-
sistance for a divorce. When Maitland
asked her why she wanted to end her
marriage, she replied that her husband
had just killed three people. Karen Hicks
had come home from work a few hours
after the murders to find the police
swarming her apartment. After question-
ing her in a squad car, the police had let
her go inside to retrieve her dog and cat
and get a change of clothes. She'd then
gone to a friend's place. Her husband
called her from jail. According to Mait-
land, Karen Hicks told him that Craig
had "basically said, 'Have a nice life'---
that he was sorry, this wasn't her fault.
He was just curt and tight and sounded
to her like he was reading from a script."
Karen Hicks told Maitland that she
didn't believe her husband had commit-
ted the murders out of hatred for Mus-
lims. Craig believed that everybody
should be treated equally, she said. But
he'd been so agitated about the parking
issue that she'd suggested he seek coun-
selling. Maitland told her, "You have
about a two-hour window here. There's
nothing we can do about the fact that
you're the ex-wife of a murderer. You'll
be that all your life. But we can make
the point that you aren't the ex-wife
of a terrorist." Maitland recommended
holding a press conference, saying that